New on the blog: my last post specifically on Amiga hardware for awhile, I suspect. This works multiplexed sprites into the little shooting gallery game I've been developing as an example, and gives us a reasonable look into the division of labor between hardware and software on the system.
https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2024/12/21/amiga-500-finishing-the-shooting-gallery-project/
I don't think that's what he meant. So instead I sat down and sketched out how far you could get by making every aspect of the system as dynamic as possible, and got a vision of a system that basically erases its existence from the end user's perspective.
If you push everything absolutely as hard as you can, you can end up in a world that looks like a slightly more powerful bob-based system than the full system you actually have.
Which feels like a letdown, but I also think it's inevitable.
@mcmartin So to clarify - I do not consider the built-in "autoincrement" sprite DMA reuse to be very useful. Because they have to be contiguous lists, as soon as sprites start moving, you end up copying a lot of data around very frame - either rearranging sprites in a single DMA channel, more moving sprite data from one DMA channel to another.
It gets even worse if you want 15-colour and/or wider sprites.
At that point, might as well just blit them :-)
@TomF I was never impressed by Apple's "Windows 95 is Apple 84" campaign, and the more I learned about Classic Mac OS over the years the more contemptuous I got of it.
Workbench 1.3, though, absolutely *can* claim to be Win95 class with a straight face.
The A1200 is competing with "install Linux on a simulated Atari ST" here, and yeah, I'll take WB3 over that.
McMartin
Tom Forsyth